Contemporary Fiction Recent Picks
March 2007
The underlined titles will take you directly to our catalogue.
Some featured items are linked via a book cover to enable you to read more reviews.
The angel of history, by Bruno Arpaia; translated by Minna Proctor. (2006)"For a brief moment in 1940 the lives of a young Spanish militant and a reclusive academic of German and Jewish heritage are thrown together. Along with thousands of others across Europe, both men have fled their homeland in the face of fascist persecution. Yet, until the day their paths converge on a remote mountain pass between France and Spain, their experience of war has been vastly different. Based on true events of Benjamin's life, and ranging from Paris' Left Bank to the prison camps of southern France. This novel explores how the history we think we know is not a series of events but rather a constellation of countless individual lives, and although every story is unique, each is founded on the same human desire, which is to be remembered." (Amazon)
The goodbye kiss, by Massimo Carlotto; translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti. (2006)"Giorgio Pellegrini is wanted in Italy for a series of crimes linked to political extremism. He has been hiding out in Central America, half-heartedly lending a hand to a group of leftwing militants engaged in a bloody civil war. After the Comandante orders the assassination of his companion and compatriot, Pellegrini decides it might just be time to head back home. As devoid of morals now as he once was full of idealistic fervour, an inveterate womanizer and a seasoned opportunist, Giorgio seems willing to do almost anything to avoid prison, from selling out his old pals in The Movement to cutting deals with crooked cops. But just how far is he willing to go to earn himself the guise of respectability in a society that appears to have lost the values it once defended so fiercely?" (Cover)
The blue taxi : a novel, by N.S. Köenings. (2006)"One afternoon in the streets of an East African neighbourhood, a young Indian boy is struck by a bus and loses his leg. Among the stunned witnesses whose lives are changed forever by this event are a Belgian woman, Sarie Turner, and her young daughter. Sarie has learned not to expect too much from her bookish, ne'er-do-well British husband or indeed from life. But in the wake of the accident, her life changes direction in unexpected ways. When Sarie visits the convalescing child, she becomes fascinated with the boy's father. Before long, the two begin an affair that surprises them both. Their secret passion is observed by the matriarch, who is the eyes and ears of the neighbourhood, even as it is completely overlooked by both Sarie's husband and by the very proper British Council ladies who are determined to turn Sarie into a respectable woman." (Amazon)
Cupid's dart, by David Nobbs. (2007)"Alan and Ange are on a train, heading for London. Alan is a philosophy lecturer, still a virgin at fifty-five; Ange a twenty-something, horoscope reading, darts groupie. They certainly don't expect their first casual meeting to lead to anything, but it does. Seizing the day, as they pull into Euston station, Alan asks Ange out to dinner and so begins the unlikeliest of liaisons. As they get to know each other, they realise how different their worlds are, from the claustrophobic confines of an Oxford College to the heady excitement of a big dart's match; from Liebfraumilch to Wittgenstein and everything in between. But can they survive their differences in age and background? Are Alan's feelings the stuff of obsession and infatuation or is this true love? And what sort of philosopher is he if he cannot define and understand love?" (Amazon)
The amnesia clinic, by James Scudamore. (2006)"Set in Quito, Ecuador, the Amnesia Clinic, tells the story of Anti, a quiet English boy, who strikes up a friendship with flamboyant local classmate Fabian. Fabian is everything Anti isn't: handsome, athletic and popular. What's more, he lives with his cool, eccentric Uncle Suarez, while Anti is stuck in the dull ex-pat world inhabited by his parents. Suarez, a storyteller par excellence, infects the boys with his passion for outlandish tales, and before long, the relationship between them becomes one conducted entirely through the medium of storytelling. One subject is taboo: Fabian's parents. But when details surrounding their disappearance begin to emerge, Anti decides to console his friend with a story suggesting that Fabian's mother may be living at a bizarre hospital on the coast for patients with memory loss. With confused emotions and reality losing its tenuous grip, the boys embark on a quixotic voyage across Ecuador in search of an 'Amnesia Clinic' that may, or may not exist." (Amazon)
Everything must go, by Elizabeth Flock. (2007)
"Henry Powell still lives and works in the same non-descript north-eastern town where he was born and raised. Compared to some, his life has been lucky, if inauspicious: a glorious senior year of high school, a football scholarship, an undemanding job that pays the bills, a roof over his head, friends to share a beer with on the weekend. Yet Henry is impossibly stuck, unable to reconcile the dreams of his youth with the reality of the unassuming, man he's become. Called home from college by family tragedy, Henry's life is on pause. It is Baxter's, the men's clothing store where he works, which provides Henry's only window to the world passing him by, where he marks time by the milestones in his classmates' lives, where his daydreams reveal the Henry that might have been." (Amazon)
Measuring the world, by Daniel Kehlmann; translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway. (2006)
"Towards the end of the 18th century, these two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world. Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat schooled for greatness, negotiates savannah and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. Physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss, a man born in poverty who will be recognized as the greatest mathematician since Newton, does not even need to leave his home in Gottingen to know that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head, cannot imagine a life without women and yet jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. “ Measuring the World" recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment." (Amazon)
Gate of the sun, by Elias Khoury; translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies. (2006)
"In a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunis, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. His spiritual son, Dr. Khaleel, who has no real medical qualifications, nurses the older man, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. In an attempt to revive his patient, Khaleel, like a modern-day Sheherazade, begins telling Yunis the stories of their people's exile in Lebanon: their flight from Galilee in 1948; the violence of the 1950s; the massacre at the Shatila camp in 1982. He evokes deserted peasant villages, the suffering caused by the Lebanese civil war and the refugees' hopes to return home with a subtle mixture of anger and compassion." (Amazon)
The castle in the forest : a novel, by Norman Mailer. (2007)
"With this his first major work of fiction in more than a decade, Norman Mailer offers what may be his consummate literary endeavour: He has set out to explore the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man who is later revealed to be an exceptional presence, gives us young Adolf from birth, as well as Hitler’s father and mother, his sisters and brothers, and the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence. With a tapestry of unforgettable characters, this novel delivers its playful twists and surprises with astonishing insight into the nature of the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all." (Cover)
Afterwards, by Rachel Seiffert. (2007)
"When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship. She is a nurse, he a painter and decorator; both are still young and hopeful of each other, but each brings with them an emotional burden. Alice's father has been a yawning absence all her life, and her beloved grandmother, who helped raise her has recently died. For his part, Joseph refuses to speak about his army experiences in Northern Ireland and Alice suspects that his general reticence hides an even more deeply troubled past. When her widowed grandfather begins to tell Joseph about his own RAF experiences in l950s Kenya, something still raw is tapped in Joseph; his reaction to the older man's unburdening of guilt is both unexpected and devastating for them all." (Amazon)
Check your card I New fiction, DVD and cd lists I How to place a reserve I Borrowing I Contact us
